ELRS GPS Tracking: No Flight Controller Required (Finally)

You used to need a flight controller to get GPS data from your RC vehicle. ExpressLRS 4.0 decided that was unnecessary. The headline is simple: you can now plug a GPS directly into your ELRS receiver. It's a particularly neat trick for cars, boats, and classic fixed-wing planes where a flight controller is just expensive, unnecessary bloat. Update your firmware—both ends need 4.0—and suddenly your 'dumb' vehicle is reporting coordinates, generating recovery QR codes, or feeding live telemetry to a map.

We highly recommend watching the full guide by Joshua Bardwell below. He details exactly how to configure the receiver over Wi-Fi (setting pins to Serial RX) and the inevitable reality that your GPS probably needs manual setup. Most GPS modules ship at 9600 baud, but ELRS demands 115200. This requires u-center software, an FTDI adapter, and a moment of patience while you force the GPS to stop talking at the wrong speed, change the protocol to NMEA, and permanently save the settings before ELRS will cooperate.

Once the telemetry hits your radio, you have options. The simplest is just displaying coordinates on the EdgeTX screen for manual recovery. If that's too tedious, there's a Lua script to generate a QR code so you can just scan it and open the crash site directly on your phone's map. The advanced (and admittedly finicky) route is feeding that data live to an Android tablet running ATAK with the UAS Tool. This requires setting your radio's USB mode to 'Telemetry Mirror' to turn your handheld transmitter into a very convoluted data modem. It's complicated, occasionally reliable, and exactly the kind of over-engineering we love.

This update confirms that ExpressLRS is less of a radio link and more of a Swiss Army serial bus with an identity crisis. Whether you just want a safety net for your speed run car or you're trying to build a budget asset tracker, this feature is undeniably useful. You can read the original, overly verbose post here if you need to know exactly why Bardwell’s specific setup was a bad idea for the real world (using three PWM channels and burning one on GPS leaves you with... two). Such is progress.